Atithi Devo Bhava
I first became interested in translating Indian mythology when I studied Sanskrit in college in 1958. And when I went to India for the first time in 1963, at the age of 22, I wrote letters home to my parents, including a number of pages retelling Hindu myths—about Shiva, about the mare Saranyu, about the birth of the gods—which I continued to be interested in and about which I later wrote several books. These early letters, with the myths, are reproduced in a book of mine just published by Speaking Tiger: An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-64. They reveal how early I was fascinated by the challenge of translating Hindu myths. Myths are so deeply permeated by the cultures that tell them that any translator can only hope to capture a mere fraction of all their meanings. That fraction has to carry a double meaning: the meaning that it had in its parent culture, and that it will still have for the new culture—which may, in fact, take on new significance that it never had originally. The translator cannot hope to capture it all, and so each translator captures something different, which is one reason why there are so many different translations of the great myths of any culture—each translator tries and inevitably fails to capture it all, and so we try again and again.
Re-canonising Kannada Literature 
Meeting Damodar Mauzo 
